Comment from Anonymous

I am submitting this comment in strong opposition to the FTC’s proposed policy statement titled “Concerning the Suppression of Accuracy in Artificial Intelligence Systems,” Matter No. P264200 / Document ID FTC-2026-0859-0001. This proposed statement does not protect consumers from AI harm. It protects AI companies from accountability by reframing equity-centered correction and anti-discrimination safeguards as potential consumer deception. The FTC’s own statement treats outputs shaped by “undisclosed ideological objectives” as deceptive, connects that claim to companies complying with state AI accountability laws, including Colorado’s revised Artificial Intelligence Act, and states that steering AI systems in that manner can violate Section 5. That framing is dangerous and legally unsound. State AI accountability laws that require companies to address algorithmic discrimination are not ideological coercion. They are consumer protection, civil-rights protection, and public accountability. A system that denies people jobs, housing, credit, healthcare, education, public benefits, or legal fairness through discriminatory automation is not “accurate.” It is reproducing structural harm. AI systems are not neutral. They are trained on datasets shaped by historical inequality, colonial archives, racial hierarchy, gender hierarchy, ableist assumptions, language dominance, institutional exclusion, and corporate extraction. When those systems are used in consequential decisions, the harms are real. The FTC’s own prior interagency position recognized this reality. In 2023, the FTC joined the CFPB, DOJ, and EEOC in recognizing that automated systems are used to make critical decisions affecting people’s rights and opportunities, and that these systems can perpetuate unlawful bias, automate unlawful discrimination, and produce harmful outcomes. The FTC must not now adopt a policy that treats correction of those harms as suspicious steering. The FTC document’s use of the phrase so-called “equity” is a federal warning shot at anti-discrimination AI work. Equity is not a hidden agenda. Equity is a necessary correction to systems that already encode racial, gendered, disability-related, class-based, anti-immigrant, anti-trans, and colonial harm. Treating equity-centered correction as potential deception protects the discriminatory baseline and punishes repair. Section 5 of the FTC Act must not be used to preempt state-level AI accountability and anti-discrimination protections. State protections against algorithmic discrimination do not conflict with consumer protection. They are consumer protection. Consumers are not protected when AI systems reproduce discrimination. Consumers are protected when companies must identify, reduce, and prevent discriminatory outcomes. This proposed statement is part of a larger federal sequence. Executive Order 14365 directed the preparation of a national AI policy framework, the evaluation of existing state AI laws, and FTC action on how state laws requiring changes to AI outputs can conflict with Section 5. The March 20, 2026 National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence urged Congress to preempt state AI laws that impose undue burdens on AI development and innovation. The FTC’s July 1, 2026 proposed policy statement is the enforcement-stage expression of that same preemption strategy. This proposed statement also sits inside a broader civil-rights rollback. Executive Order 14281 declares that it is federal policy to eliminate disparate-impact liability “in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.” The FTC’s AI proposal imports that anti-disparate-impact logic into AI governance. The proposed statement does not center the communities most harmed by uncorrected AI bias, including people of the global majority, disabled people, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ communities, women, workers, tenants, patients, students, and people targeted by surveillance and criminal legal systems. It treats the alleged harm of equity-centered correction as more important than the real harm of discriminatory automation. That is an unacceptable inversion of consumer protection. The Commission must withdraw this proposed policy statement. The FTC must not use Section 5 to chill equity-centered AI, anti-discrimination safeguards, or state-level algorithmic accountability. The FTC must not frame the correction of discriminatory outputs as consumer deception while treating discriminatory baselines as accuracy. I urge the Commission to commission independent research on algorithmic discrimination and develop future AI accuracy guidance through a process that centers the communities most harmed by AI systems, not the companies most protected by them. The FTC must protect people from algorithmic harm. It must not protect AI companies from accountability for causing it.